Create a Google News Sitemap

This article explains the guidelines for a Google News Sitemap and steps to submit a Sitemap.

Before you start, your site needs to be included in Google News. If it's not, you can apply for inclusion within the Google News Publisher Center.

A Sitemap contains detailed information about specific types of content on your site. A Google News Sitemap lets you control which content you submit to Google News. If you already have a web Sitemap, we recommend that you create a separate Sitemap for news content.

Benefits

Here are some benefits of creating and submitting a Google News Sitemap:

Discover news articles faster. Sitemaps allow Google News to find all the news articles on your site more quickly.

Crawl and index all news articles. Sitemaps point our crawler directly to each news article’s URL, which improves coverage of the content on your site.

Include URLs for articles published in the last 2 days. You can remove articles older than 2 days from the News Sitemap, but they’ll remain in the News index for the regular 30-day period.

Update your News Sitemap with fresh articles as they're published. Google News crawls News Sitemaps as often as it crawls the rest of your site.

Add 1,000 URLs or less. If you want to include more, break these URLs into multiple Sitemaps and use a Sitemap index file to manage them. Use the XML format provided in the Sitemap protocol. Do not list more than 50,000 Sitemaps in your Sitemap file. These limits help ensure that your web server isn't serving large files to Google News.

Do not create a News Sitemap for each update. Instead, update your current Sitemap with your new article URLs.

Do not use the Google Sitemap Generator to create a News Sitemap. The generator would include URLs that don't correspond to specific news articles.

Example sitemap entry

A Google News Sitemap uses the Sitemap protocol. Here’s an example of a News Sitemap entry:

Submit your sitemap

After you've created your News Sitemap, submit it through the Search Console. Visit the Search Console Help Center for more information on how to manage Sitemaps. We also recommend that you upload your Sitemap to the highest level directory that contains your news articles.

If you submit your News Sitemap before your site has been reviewed and approved by our team, you can receive errors.

News-specific tag definitions

Review the Google News tags for Sitemaps below:

Tag

Required?

Description

<publication>

Yes

The publication where the article appears. It has 2 required child tags: <name> and <language>.

The <name> is the name of the news publication. It must exactly match the name as it appears on your articles on news.google.com, except for anything in parentheses.

The <language> is the language of your publication. Use an ISO 639 Language Code (2 or 3 letters). Exception: For Simplified Chinese, use zh-cn and for Traditional Chinese, use zh-tw.

<publication_date>

Yes

Article publication date in W3C format, using either the "complete date" (YYYY-MM-DD) or the "complete date plus hours, minutes, and seconds" format with time zone designator (YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssTZD) format. Specify the original date and time when the article was published on your site; do not specify the time when you added the article to your Sitemap.
Our crawler accepts any of the formats below:

The title of the news article. Note: The title can be shortened for space reasons when shown on Google News. Include the title of the article as it appears on your site. Do not include author name, publication name, or publication date in the title tag.